Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science
Author: Halton Arp, 6"x9" paperback, 314 pages, ISBN:0-9683689-0-5
A wonderful book, Seeing Red is a must read since it is both
educational and hard-hitting while being readable and entertaining. Arp
dismantles conventional astrophysics, based on redshift being
proportional to distance, by sharing his observations on quasars,
some of which are highly redshifted yet connected to low redshifted
galaxies by material bridges. Writing eye-opening material in more
than one arena, Arp takes on the corruption of good science in
academia, government and publishing after giving us great material
concerning red shift, the Big Bang, and cosmology.
Seeing Red can be ordered
via the link below.

A common belief
today is that Edwin Hubble discovered in 1929 that the universe was
expanding and that the Big Bang theory is the unavoidable conclusion
from that fact. But what did Hubble actually say?

"If the redshifts are a Doppler shift...the observations as
they stand lead to the anomaly of a closed universe, curiously small and
dense, and, it may be added, suspiciously young. On the other hand, if
redshifts are not Doppler effects, these anomalies disappear and the
region observed appears as a small, homogeneous, but insignificant
portion of a universe extended indefinitely in both space and time." (MNRAS,
17, 506, 1937)

What Hubble actually discovered was a correlation among the
angular sizes of galaxies, their apparent luminosities, and their
redshifts. If we explain this correlation in terms of our most familiar
experiences from moving around on the surface of the Earth, we will
assume that both smaller and dimmer are related to moving farther away.
Redshift, the displacement of light toward lower frequencies, is related
to the speed of moving farther away, just as the sound of a car's horn
sounds lower as it speeds away (the Doppler effect).

Combining these assumptions in an "argument from familiarity"
results in the conclusion that the farther away a galaxy is the faster
it is moving away--just as happens in our familiar experience with
flying debris from an explosion. Therefore, galaxies must have exploded
from a single point at a particular time: the creation of the universe.

But science is not about accepting what is familiar. Science
is about asking further questions: How could the familiar explanation be
disproved? What else could it be? Hubble was referring to these further
questions with his words "if" and "on the other hand." Until his death
in 1953, Hubble continued to argue against an expanding universe/big
bang interpretation of the data from his 1929 observations.

It took 40 years to discover the evidence that disproved the
argument from familiarity: Beginning in the late 1960's, Halton Arp
photographed high-redshift objects (QSOs) clustered around and connected
to low- redshift galaxies. His observations contradicted the "redshift
equals distance" assumption and suggested that "smaller and fainter"
meant merely smaller and fainter. But by then the Big Bang had become an
object of faith, institutionalized in the astronomical hierarchy and in
the professional journals. Asking further questions had become
heretical. Arp was ostracized. He lost his access to publishing in
the astronomical journals, his prestige and his telescope time because
he continued to make observations that contradicted the Big Bang.

"If astronomy were a science," a famous astronomer has said,
the Big Bang would have been discarded decades ago instead of having
become the touchstone of faith and funding.

[See Arp's lecture video, "Intrinsic
Redshift," for more details of this new picture of the universe.]
Available from Mikamar Publishing